“What the hell are they doing?” Zane Wilder whispered.
“They’re training,” Matthias murmured. He tucked his ring and the chain it hung on around his neck under his T-shirt, not wanting a glint of sunlight on metal to give away their position. Both he and Zane lay prone on the ground as they peered over the edge of the ridge. A group of juveniles were clustered below in a clearing, and all listened avidly to the woman instructing them.
He and Zane were on a scouting mission, gathering as much information as possible on the Woodland Pack. Four months earlier his alpha prime, Jared Gray, had been poisoned in a dentist’s chair. The dentist, Ryder Galen, had ultimately proved his innocence and uncovered the conspiracy between Rafe Woodland, alpha prime of Woodland Pack, and Arthur Armstrong, the head of one of the oldest families in the capital city, Irondell. Arthur was currently remanded to a Reform prison, awaiting his trial.
Arthur Armstrong was a human, not a werewolf, so his crime—being a crossbreed crime—fell under the control of Reform Authority. Getting justice from that individual was out of his hands. Rafe Woodland, though, was a different matter entirely.
As neighboring werewolf packs, his own pack, Alpine, had requested to transfer the matter out of the Reform justice system, to deal with it under tribal jurisdiction. The Reform justice system governed all of the tribes, be they shadow breed or human, and had to be seen as fair and just for all. There were certain cases, though, that could be transferred to the tribes. In this case, when a werewolf from one pack coordinated the murder of a werewolf in another pack—especially if the murdered werewolf was an alpha prime—then the transfer was almost automatic. Rafe Woodland was proving a hard lycan to catch, though. He’d refused to acknowledge the charges and refused to turn himself in to Alpine.
So now they were working on plan B, perving on—er, no, scouting out the enemy. He eyed the woman below.
The sunlight filtered through the trees, picking out copper highlights in her braided brown hair. He wished he could see her eyes, but they were too far off. She turned away, her back to them, and Matthias couldn’t help noticing the indentation of her slender waist, the sexy curve of her hips, the way her jeans cupped her trim butt. She had an athletic figure that drew his attention, and he grew hard as he eyed her lean grace as she walked around the clearing, instructing her charges.
A cool breeze washed over him, a sign that the chill snows of winter were just around the corner. It teased the back of his neck, and he could almost imagine it was her fingers caressing him, playing with him, teasing him. Tempting him. He watched her hands as she spoke, the smooth, rolling gestures hypnotic and innately sensual. He wanted those hands on him. The lust he felt now was at first uncomfortable, then painful, and wholly surprising and unwelcome.
His eyes narrowed. He didn’t like the rise of desire within. Didn’t like it at all. He told himself he was merely surveying the enemy, that his intense interest—not lust—was completely warranted. She was undeniably sexy, moving with a lithe fluidity that called to a part of him he’d trapped and buried. His senses sharpened. His body throbbed in time with the slow, languid thump of his heart. The leaves in the surrounding trees rustled, whispering encouragement. He took a deep breath to calm his body’s reaction, and breathed in the loamy richness of the earth, the rock on which they lay hard and unrelenting. He caught the whiff of a scent, something he knew by instinct was hers, a delicate trail of spice amidst the fragrant forest. He dug his fingers into the stone outcrop as he battled the sensuality that was flooding him. He wanted to leap down, grab her and carry her off. The beast within him unfurled, awakened by his reactions, stretching, arching.
This was not the time to lose himself in an attraction, damn it. He was tempted, though. Tempted to ignore his goal, the reason he was spying on the enemy, to abandon his friend and surrender to the lust that was licking at his defenses, like a bushfire consuming the land.
The woman commanded the attention of several adolescents as she spoke with them quietly. Matthias felt a smile tease at the corners of his mouth as he watched a little boy of maybe five years old standing next to her. Once again, his reaction surprised him as much as it displeased him. The kid mimicked her stance, nodding and frowning as she spoke to the group. A man stood behind the class, and Matthias wondered briefly who he was and what his connection was to the woman. Something deep, dark and possessive rose within him, and yes, so did a hint of jealousy, of envy, that this man was within her trusted circle. The man nodded, then jogged away into the undergrowth.
The woman held up her hands, calling their focus back to her as she assigned partners within the group. Her back was to him, but her movement raised her shirt and jacket, calling his attention back to her butt, her waist. This reaction he had to her was new. Alien. The kid started to wander off, but she grabbed hold of the back of the younger kid’s hooded pullover, not once breaking her focus from the adolescents as she gently pulled the child back to her side. Matthias sucked in a breath as, just for a moment, the scene below merged with a memory he’d ruthlessly ignored and never thought to revisit, of another woman, another boy...another time.
The kid frowned up at her, folding his arms as his lips pouted, but the woman ruffled his hair absently as she kept talking. After a few more minutes of instructions, she clapped her hands and gestured to the edge of the clearing, and the pairs of adolescents took off in multiple directions.
“That must be the Woodland Tracker Prime,” Zane murmured. “I’ve heard she’s good. One of the best.”
Matthias raised his eyebrows briefly at his friend’s remarks. The guardian had a knack for acquiring intel. So far he’d been quite valuable in getting information on the Woodland pack. Although he had to admit, even he’d heard of the Woodland Tracker Prime.
“Hmm.” Matthias didn’t take his gaze off the woman as she finally turned her attention to the boy. She folded her arms and tipped her head to the side. Her brown braid slid forward over her shoulder, and his body tightened. He wanted to touch that hair, unravel the braid and watch it slide through his fingers. He wondered if it was as silky as it looked. Again, he was stunned by his curiosity—no, his need—to know more of this woman.
She was tall, he could tell, despite their angle of viewing. Damn, she had great legs. Long, slender and encased in denim, her coltish frame had just enough curves to catch and hold his attention. Those legs...wrapped around his waist...
He clenched his teeth. This was not the time to get horny over a she-wolf, for God’s sake—no matter how long it’d been since he’d looked at another woman as more than just a pack mate. The woman below was Woodland. The enemy. Her family—hell, maybe even she, had been responsible for Jared’s death. The pack was systematically thumbing its collective nose at the rest of the lycan tribe. They had killed his friend, his mentor, his alpha prime.
And she was one of them.
Everyone at Woodland would pay for what they’d done to Alpine. Just the thought that she was part of the enemy pack—and in a trusted position, if she was training juveniles—was enough to snap everything back into perspective. He wasn’t there to ogle. He was there to gather information, maybe even hunt.
From this distance, he couldn’t make out what was being said. The kid dragged his toe in the dirt, and she squatted down so that her eyes were level with his. Her jeans tightened around her butt, although it was the sight of the woman leaning in to the little boy that brought a tightness to his throat, the emotion taking him by surprise. He shifted, trying to shrug the moment off. She looked nothing like Cara.
“One would almost think Woodland care for their young, too,” Zane commented in a rough whisper.
“They’re still lycans,” Matthias murmured. And as such, had similar weaknesses to the rest of the lycan tribe, weaknesses that could be exploited. “They’ll still value life.” The young were to be protected, nurtured. Loved.
Whatever the woman said cheered up the kid, as he started to strut about the clearing. He’d point at something, and she’d either shake her head or shrug, walking behind him with her hands clasped behind her back. She was relaxed, patiently answering the questions the boy asked. Eventually he reached the point where the man had stood, and looked up at his instructor. She smiled and nodded, giving him a high five, then knelt beside him, tracing something in the dirt. The kid nodded, took a few steps, then pointed. She gave him a thumbs-up, rising to her feet to follow.
Zane started to shuffle back from the edge, but Matthias’s hand shot out, clutching his forearm. They both froze. The woman halted at the edge of the clearing and cocked her head to the side. She turned to slowly scan the area. Matthias didn’t move. His muscles clenched tight, and his breath caught in his chest. The reason they’d picked this vantage point was because they couldn’t be seen from below, yet the woman’s gaze remained glued to the ridge for a moment, before finally drifting on. The boy must have asked her something, for she turned to him, a reassuring smile on her face as she held her arms out. He ran up to her, and she grasped his wrists, swinging him up and over her shoulders until he could wrap his arms around her neck. She carried him, piggyback-style, into the woods, furtively glancing over her shoulder as she went.
Matthias relaxed once she was out of sight.
“Did she see us?” Zane asked as he retreated from the ridge.
Matthias shook his head. “I don’t think so.”
“Should we go after her? She could prove valuable.”
He shook his head. “No.” He kept scanning the trees, but it was as though the brown-haired woman had melted into the forest, disappearing like a wisp of mist. He smiled. They wouldn’t go after her, not now.
Maybe later.
* * *
Trinity Caldwell slung her backpack over her shoulder as she stepped into the great hall. Fires burned from the wall sconces bolted into the stone, casting flickering shadows down the walls and across the dirt floor as members of her pack went about their daily business. Not many spoke, though, and most walked with their eyes downcast as they went about their tasks. The hall had almost returned to normal, although there were still some repair areas cordoned off. Just over a month ago an explosion had ripped through the hall and some of the main corridors, and there were still some ongoing issues as a result. At least Rafe had acceded to her request for routine structural inspections.
She sighed as she stepped brusquely along. They still weren’t quite sure how the explosion had occurred. One moment Rafe was interrogating a half-blood vampire lawyer and her client, Ryder Galen, a dentist accused of murdering the alpha prime from a neighboring pack, and in the next, Galen had somehow managed to trigger an explosion that knocked all those in the hall unconscious. Thankfully, nobody died. Not from the explosion, anyway. One lycan had lost his teeth, courtesy of the dentist, and two guardians had died in the forest on their way to returning the vampire lawyer to the nearby vampire colony. Well, at least that was what she and her pack had thought at the time. It turned out Rafe, her pack’s alpha prime, had subtly instructed the guardians to permanently remove the vampire lawyer. She’d killed those guardians in self-defense. All deaths that could have been avoided, damn it. She thought of Jax. His father had been one of the guardians slain in the forest—a guardian prime, no less. Her pack was still reeling from the death of a highly respected, highly valued warrior. His partner, dealing with a young son and the death of her mate, was struggling to cope.
Trinity sighed. She knew how it felt, losing one parent and having another swept away in a tide of mourning. Well, she’d keep an eye on the kid. At least Jax would know he wasn’t invisible. Not around Trinity, anyway. She’d taken him out on one of the juvenile training sessions, and the kid had done well. He needed a short leash, though, she’d noticed. He had a tendency to wander off and get into mischief. She smiled. He was a good kid.
She made her way toward a little-used corridor that would lead her deeper into the mountain and then out the other side. She skirted along the rim of the great hall, nodding occasionally to friends and family as she passed them. Some acknowledged her. Others acted as though they didn’t see her—but that was a reasonable reaction, she kept telling herself. She wasn’t going to let it hurt her, not like it had when she was a teen. The great hall was a large, long cave, and along the rim the stone wall had natural pockets of space used for storage or as alcoves used for sundry tasks and private conversations.
A roar echoed down the main corridor, and instinctively she ducked behind a stone column as her alpha prime, Rafe Woodland, stalked into the long stone cavern. She’d learned that disappearing was always the best option in her dealings with the lycan.
“What do you mean, you can’t?” he shouted, arms out.
Dion, the recently appointed Woodland Guardian Prime, strode alongside him. “The supplies have been stopped beyond Summercliffe—Alpine have made a blockade.”
Rafe took a deep breath as he clenched and unclenched his fingers, and Trinity drew deeper into the shadows. Some of the others in the hall paused. Everyone knew the warning signs.
“We need those supplies,” he grated, his teeth visible.
“We can’t get them.”
Rafe picked up a cup and hurled it at the wall, and Trinity flinched as the ceramic shattered into small pieces.
Those close enough in the hall to witness the display rose to their feet, and Trinity watched as some of the men exchanged wary looks. A child huddling under one of the tables closest to Rafe caught Trinity’s eye, and she sighed. Jax. The pup looked scared, and Trinity glanced around for his mom. The woman was nowhere to be seen; she was probably back in her den staring at a dirt wall as she pined for her dead mate.
Meanwhile, their alpha was having a temper tantrum, and the pack was keeping its distance. Like she should. Jax’s anxious gaze met hers, and her breath escaped in a frustrated gust. She knew what it was like to be the lost kid hiding under the table. Damn it. She should mind her own business. Pretend she didn’t hear or see anything. One more look at the kid cowering beneath the table and she pursed her lips. Ah, hell.
She stepped out from behind the pillar, trying to do it slowly, without calling attention to herself.
“You had one job—get the supplies and come back.” Rafe backhanded his guardian, sending him crashing against the table under which Jax cowered, and Trinity frowned. Dion reared up, his fists clenched, but forced himself to lower his gaze beneath the angry glare of his alpha prime. Dion’s predecessor had died at the hands of the vampire lawyer in the woods, and Dion was still trying to prove himself to the pack leader. It wasn’t Dion’s fault the border was closed. He didn’t deserve that kind of treatment. He was a guardian prime now, too, and should be treated with the respect due his station, especially in front of the rest of the pack.
“What did you expect, Rafe?” Trinity asked coolly as she stepped farther into the hall, wending her way through the small cluster of people, all attempts at blending into the background set aside. She tried to hide the tension in her fists by clutching onto the straps of her backpack. He was being unfair to her pack mate—and she hated unfair. “We’ve antagonized them.” She was still trying to understand the strategic benefit of killing the Alpine Alpha Prime, and she knew other pack members struggled with Rafe’s rationale. If she’d known Rafe’s intention of killing another pack’s alpha prime, she would have tried to stop him. Which was probably why she hadn’t known until Rafe had sent guardians into Nightwing, the neighboring vampire territory, to abduct a half-blood vampire and the human accused of the Alpine pack leader’s murder in an effort to bury the truth with them. No wonder Alpine were blocking them. They’d killed an alpha prime.
Rafe turned to face her, and his eyes narrowed when he recognized her.
“Trinity. This doesn’t concern you.”
Despite the knot in her stomach, she raised her eyebrows. “Well, if we can’t get anything into Woodland, it concerns me. It concerns the whole pack.” Nightwing was their most direct route from Irondell, the capital city of Metriz. After the time of Resolution, and during Reformation, each breed was assigned territory, and there were strict rules for governance, travel and trade that had to be observed. Irondell was the engine for it all, home to a blending of all breeds, including humans, and the seat for the Reform Council.
While they had other options like going through the River, Glen and Alpine territories, as well as the Plains, each alternative presented its own issues. They were already low on some of the medical supplies, and they needed to restock their food before the first snows of winter.
Rafe put his hands on his hips as he strolled toward her. His movements were casual, but his posture was intimidating. The ring on his finger glinted in the torchlight from the wall sconces. It bore the Woodland crest, and was only worn by the Woodland Alpha Prime. The sight of that ring would normally make a pack member bow their head in submission.
She lifted her chin. She was a former Scion. She wouldn’t allow herself to be intimidated. As he stepped closer, she recognized the ire in his green eyes, such a bright contrast against the fall of dark, scruffy hair, the tanned skin and dark shadow of a beard, and she locked her knees into place. Nope. Not intimidated. He was tall and broad-shouldered, his size as imposing as the mountain they lived within, but she knew him well enough to see past the darkly handsome looks to the even darker personality within. They’d lived as pack mates all her life, yet she could honestly say she didn’t know this lycan. He’d been normal, once. Hell, they’d been friends. Then over the course of one winter he’d visited his father in another pack and returned a born-again douche. She barely recognized this angry, bitter stranger. The man who’d taken over her father’s position. Her grip tightened on the straps of her backpack.
“Don’t push it,” he said, his voice low in warning.
“Rafe—we’ve just received a request,” a voice called out, and Trinity turned, as did Rafe. Channing, the head of tech, jogged into the hall.
Rafe frowned, visibly annoyed by the interruption. “For what? From whom?”
Channing came to a stop in front of his alpha, his expression earnest. “Alpine Pack request parley.”
Trinity’s eyes widened, and she could sense the growing trepidation from her pack mates behind her, yet she felt a relief at the distraction, no longer under the steely regard of her alpha prime.
“Oh, do they just?” Rafe murmured.
“‘Matthias, Alpine Guardian Prime, formally requests parley with Rafe, Alpha Prime of Woodland Pack,’” Channing quoted, then dropped his gaze.
Dion swore softly, and the guardians who were in the hall rose to their feet. Trinity stepped closer, and her movement drew Rafe’s attention.
“This doesn’t concern you, either.” His tone was implacable.
Parley from Alpine didn’t concern her? Didn’t concern pack? Woodland had killed the Alpine Alpha Prime. Alpine were coordinating blockages to supplies and services, and now wanted to discuss a resolution under truce. This concerned all of Woodland Pack. She opened her mouth to tell him so, but Rafe put a finger to his lips.
“Remember, you’re no longer part of the Family Prime.” He cocked his head to the side, and flashed his teeth in a smile. Trinity eyed his incisors. Those darn teeth. Even now, he lengthened them for effect, for intimidation. This whole debacle had started when he’d visited the Armstrong shadow breed medical clinic in Irondell for a fang enhancement. Now he didn’t need to shift in order to use his fangs. Those new fangs also came with an aggressive attitude and a thirst for power. Arthur Armstrong had a lot to answer for. “Unless you’d like to discuss your position?”
He leaned against the table and folded his arms, waiting for her response. Jax paled, and looked about frantically for an escape route.
She maintained eye contact as she stepped closer and leaned down to reach under the table. “No, I’m good, thanks,” she said, and felt a small hand slide into her own.
She tugged, and the little boy crawled out, his eyes wide as he glanced up at his fearsome alpha. She pulled him behind her as she started to back away from Rafe. He watched her, his gaze shifting between her and the boy.
“Are you sure?” he asked silkily. “You seem to have an opinion on everything.” She shook her head. “Then stay out of my business,” he said, his voice louder as he straightened from his position. He glanced around the crowd in the hall. “I’m calling a guardian meeting. Everyone else, clear the hall.” He glanced back at Trinity. “I’ll deal with you later.”
Trinity swallowed as everyone except the Woodland guardians cleared the hall, the low hush of conversation gradually quieting. She nudged Jax in the direction of one of the corridors. She didn’t want to be “dealt with” later, particularly not by Rafe. She should have just kept her mouth shut and disappeared into the background.
“Go back to your den. Help out your mother. I’ll see you tomorrow for class.”
Jax nodded, all too pleased to escape the tension of the great hall.
Trinity hurried from the cavern. She didn’t look back, but she could feel the heavy weight of Rafe’s stare as she left. Next time, she really would keep her mouth shut.
She knew what he was asking. Hell, pretty much everyone within earshot knew what he was asking, but she couldn’t bring herself to do it. The price was too high.